Getting started up on time again today. Have the website up and running again. That’s a problem; I had to get money from Dad for it. Ordered a new textbook for my Organizational Behavior class from Amazon. That’s amazingly cheaper than getting it from the bookstore.Some history of computers and programmers.
Computers do not think. They’re programmed to do things. Programmers wrote the instructions computers follow. A set of those instructions is called a program.
Application programmers make distinct programs for handling particular tasks. System programmers write programs which help the computer carry out basic or universal functions.
Programming is the process of creating a logical sequence of ideas. Programming a computer is giving the computer instructions to perform specific predefined actions.
The Life Cycle of Programming
- Problem Solving Phase
- Analysis and Specification
- General Solution (Algorithm)
- Verify
- Implementation Phase
- Concrete Solution (Program)
- Test
- Maintenance Phase
- Use the Program
- Maintain (Modify and Correct Errors)
Not a bad life cycle, there. Covers the high points. We’ll go with it.
A programming language is a set of rules, symbols, and special words used to construct a computer program. It’s essentially human-readable commands which can be used to construct machine-readable instructions.
Some discussion of procedural vs. object-oriented programming. All of my formal background is procedural. VB, and most current languages, have now gone OOP. This part could be wacky; I tend to think procedurally. Don’t know how important this is going to be, or how hard it will be to adjust to.
In the context of object-oriented programming, an object is anything software developers are interested in.
An object has attributes and behaviors.
Attributes describe the object. Attributes are characteristics.
Behaviors are operations the object can perform. Behaviors can be implemented as “methods” and “events”. Methods generally occur upon explicit command. Events occur upon state changes.
A class is a template or pattern for creating an object. A class encapsulates all the attributes and behaviors that describe the object the class creates. Objects created from a class are called instances of the class. Creating an object is also called instantiating it.
Abstraction is the hiding of internal details of the object. A person/program using the object doesn’t need to know how something is generated or works, only what input results in what output.
Some attributes and behaviors may be hidden from external users; attributes which are not hidden are exposed.
Inheritance refers to the creating of a class based on an existing class. The existing class is called the base class, and the new class is called the derived class.
Polymorphism is the feature which allows the same instruction to be carried out in different ways depending on the object.
We have a project assigned, due two weeks from now. The assignment is to make an interface that looks like the Microsoft calculator. Shouldn’t be too complicated.